Obama Misses Mark on Spill Story

A bottom-dwelling eel found dead on the surface of the BP oil slick. Eels are normally never found on the surface unless pulled up from the bottom by shrimping trawlers. Photo by NWFblogs

Sometimes presidents just don’t get it, do they? When President Obama visited the beleaguered Gulf Coast last week, he made the requisite speech about hearing the constituents’ concerns. “The cameras at some point may leave; the media may get tired of the story; but we will not,” he said.

But as The New York Times Media Decoder blog pointed out, this was a puzzling assessment but also typical administration boilerplate. In fact, the media has been there for six weeks now. They’ve actually even been prevented from covering the biggest environmental disaster in US history by BP and government officials who have seemingly been working against them.

And it really resonates when someone as prominent as NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams speaks out about it, too. As he told the NYT:

“I think the phrase about the cameras leaving is just something that presidential speech writers keep on an F8 key, the kind of stuff they just say, but in this case, it was really off the mark,” he said. “We have all been all over this story and I haven’t seen any sign that we will packing up the cameras any time soon.”

The piece says the story is over-covered if anything. And the public’s interest isn’t waning, according to a Pew Research poll that found 55% of Americans are following the spill “very closely.”